Running through the forest felt like sprinting through a nightmare.

  The ground itself seemed out to get him, slick with roots and hiding stumps beneath layers of fallen leaves. Low branches waited to whip his face, each step a battle for balance. Around him, shadow and foliage wove into a living cage, swaying with every frantic breath.

  And to make things worse, he wasn’t alone. A sharp noise cracked to his left. No time to think. He had to move. A monstrous shape erupted from the dark.

  A centaur. Undead. Its rotting hide clung to knotted muscle, black and taut. The torso sagged where flesh had fallen away, ribs pushing through, straining to break free. Empty eye sockets burned with a sick light, and in its bony hands, a massive axe caught the faint glints filtering down from the canopy.

  Merlin's body moved before he could choose to. He twisted and slipped aside, clean and fast. His breath hitched. His pulse roared in his ears. No hesitation. He ran.

  He hurdled a root, rolled under a branch, then sprang forward into a sprint. But just as he cleared the curve of a massive tree, fresh horror clawed its way into view.

  A spider, enormous and malformed. Its humanoid core bulged with tumors and moss, its limbs nothing but chitin grinding against bark. On its back, massive branches writhed like possessed limbs. Merlin leapt back. The motion was fluid, precise, almost rehearsed, though nothing about this felt controlled.

  He clenched his jaw and ran again, pushing past the fire building in his muscles. The part of him that wanted to fight, to rip and burn and shatter, screamed for release. He buried it. He needed clarity. His life depended on it.

  A shriek tore through the air. Merlin skidded to a halt. Another creature stood ahead. Tall, thin, and grotesque. It looked like a nightmare hybrid of ghost and fungus, all decay and darkness. Its body bent like old wood. And its head.

  God.

  The skull throbbed with a rhythm that felt wrong. Misshapen, crawling with motion beneath the bone, it was more nest than face. Faint lights blinked and pulsed in its hollows, like eyes, like mouths.

  A weight crushed his mind. Something inside the creature reached for him. Tried to pry open his thoughts and nest inside. His vision blurred.

  Then, his arm rose. Light flared from his palm, cold and blue, sharp as glass. It cut the air and struck the creature.

  In an instant, the pressure vanished.

  Merlin staggered, chest heaving.

  "What the hell..."

  No time.

  He lunged for the nearest tree and jumped, muscles firing with instinctive precision. He climbed, branch after branch, barely pausing between leaps as the forest dropped away below.

  At last, the canopy broke. Trembling, breath thin, he collapsed onto a solid branch.

  From here, the jungle unfurled into a valley far below, where the trees grew sparser and the light softened into something almost gentle. Beyond that, wrapped in green and gold, stood the crumbling remains of a forgotten world—weathered stone half-sunk in moss, ruins that whispered of a time erased.

  And further still, Gara. Back on his mountain throne. Distant. Terrifying.

  But at least… a fixed point.

  Merlin tried to hold on to that image, to anchor himself to it like a fixed point in a world slipping out from under him. But his breathing was too fast, too loud. It spilled over. The air no longer seemed to reach him. His ribs felt tight, like a pressure building from within.

  Stop.

  His fingers trembled. His neck had locked. Every muscle pulled taut, drawn like a bowstring. He clung to the branches, frozen, though every nerve in his body screamed for action. Move. Charge. Hit something. A brutal energy was rising through him, slow and burning, impossible to contain.

  His teeth clicked together. His jaw had locked without him noticing. He pressed his lips shut, hard, far too hard, until the taste of blood filled his mouth. A dull pulse beat at his temples. He stared down into the jungle below, like a voice murmuring his name. Like every twitch beneath the leaves begged to be crushed. Now.

  No.

  His nails dug into the bark. He wanted to drop down. To feel the sting of thorns, the heat of violence, the slam of his fists against flesh. He pictured the creatures breaking under him, folding, falling quiet. And maybe then, maybe, the pressure would lift.

  Below, the jungle wasn’t still. It writhed. Sounds rose in waves: hissing, gurgling, cracking. But he no longer feared them. He wanted them gone.

  Stop.

  Then it struck. A sharp pinch, just beneath the heart. The pain had returned. His breath hitched as a strange heat unfurled through his muscles and nerves—intense, unfamiliar. It wasn’t fatigue from running, or the tension of a fight. This was something else, deeper and more unsettling.

  His forehead burned. He touched it, flinched. The fever surged, violent, like a fire that refused to go out.

  Hours blurred past. Everything softened, like falling into a dream. A bad one. Pain crept through him, consuming each fiber of his body. A haze thickened in his mind, dragging him further from the world. But even then, he wouldn’t let go. He couldn’t sleep. If he did, he might not wake up.

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  Curled in on himself, he clung to anything that remained. A memory. His mother. Her voice. Her warmth. In a breath too faint to carry, he whispered for her.

  He pulled his arms tight around his chest, shaking uncontrollably. His eyes fixed on the dark canopy above as his breath came in ragged bursts, each one harder than the last. His fevered body no longer listened. Muscles quivered, collapsing under the weight of exhaustion.

  Night crept in. His eyelids sank shut, heavy and unwilling. His body tilted, slipping sideways. A sudden drop. That sickening jolt of falling. Panic flared.

  But the ground never rose to meet him.

  Darkness took him instead.

  He drifted, weightless, lost in a void where motion meant nothing. He couldn’t tell where his body ended or where the emptiness began. A black fog curled around him, thick and unending, devouring all sense of direction. It felt like the universe had folded inward, collapsing into a single, frozen sea. He felt impossibly small, breakable, abandoned in a silence too wide to cross.

  Then came the eyes. In the dark, red glimmers began to flicker into being, shifting and multiplying, surrounding him in a widening circle. They watched, unmoving, patient.

  They were closing in, step by step. Growls gave way to hisses and feral snarls, a rising cacophony of wild sound that circled him like a noose pulling tight.

  Merlin wanted to run, to move, to do anything. But his body refused. No signal reached his limbs. The pain, however, remained. His lips were split, his back raw, his skull aching with relentless pressure. Each breath came shallow and strained. He trembled. A strangled sob escaped before he could stop it. No one came. He was alone.

  Then came the light.

  Two voices pierced the fog. Clear, but too distant to fully grasp. He tried to open his eyes, to surface from the haze, but he remained trapped in the dream, unable to break through.

  "His core has shifted from Quartz to Jade."

  The voice was cavernous, slow.

  "They are joining."

  This one he knew. Gara. He was here.

  "And Ashram's body—what will become of it?" the deep voice asked again. "Will it vanish?"

  No one answered.

  Merlin’s eyes opened. Light filtered through the leaves, blurred and harsh. It felt like coming up from drowning. His body resisted all at once, weak and unsteady, wrapped in that dull post-pain haze where everything felt half-real.

  He turned his head. Slowly. Two shapes hovered in the haze.

  One of them was Gara.

  The other was a towering man draped in a marbled toga. His dark skin was furrowed with deep lines, his features sharp, framed by a neat beard and cropped hair. He didn’t resemble a warrior or beast, but rather a living echo from some ancient memory.

  Merlin’s throat burned. He tried to speak. Barely a whisper came out:

  "What… happened?"

  The two figures turned to him. Then, without a word, they vanished. Dissolving into a shimmer of light, like fading echoes that had never been real.

  Merlin didn’t even have the strength to be surprised. He let go. Sank back into unconsciousness.

  The mist returned, wrapping around him like a boundless grey sea. All sense of direction faded. Even his sense of self dissolved. He floated through it, weightless, lost.

  Then his eyes opened.

  He was alive. But still alone.

  His limbs were numb, but still his. No creature had come for him in the night. He remained slumped at the base of the tree, heart pounding, throat parched, stomach knotting with hunger. Thirst and starvation crashed into him all at once.

  A hiccup jolted through his chest—half sob, half breath. How was he supposed to keep going like this? He was unraveling. His grip on himself was slipping. Madness loomed, or worse: becoming some predator’s next meal.

  He forced himself upright. He wouldn’t die waiting.

  Step by step, he moved forward. Slowly, cautiously. Every rustle in the jungle rang louder than it should. Each leaf and root seemed to threaten a fall. He no longer had the strength to run, but he kept his focus sharp. He wouldn’t be caught off guard again.

  As he walked, his hand drifted to his horns.

  They’d changed. Again.

  This time, he was sure. The ram-like curl had vanished. In its place were thick, blunt horns, like a bull’s.

  He didn’t like it. Why was his body still changing?

  ‘They are joining,’ Gara had said. But what did that even mean? Was he going to become himself again? Or something new. Something fused. Maybe a hybrid?

  He took a long breath and forced the thought away. Up ahead, he spotted a pool nestled between the roots of a massive tree. The water was green and murky, nothing inviting about it. But on its surface, he caught sight of his reflection.

  Since landing in this world, he hadn’t once seen his own face.

  Merlin crouched at the edge and stared into the water. What struck him first were the eyes: violet, glowing faintly, almost unreal beneath the jungle’s filtered light. He blinked a few times. Was this normal here? Eyes like that? And his hair, deep red like dried blood. Had someone dyed it?

  He studied his face. Younger. The lines had faded. His features looked sharper, cleaner, less worn from exhaustion. But harder too. He noticed a few freckles, some scattered blackheads, but none of the harsh wear of his old reflection.

  His gaze dropped to his torso. Lean muscle, compact and defined. Nothing like the thin, fragile body he used to have.

  And yet… he felt weaker than yesterday.

  Something was off. He flexed his arms, rolled his shoulders, bent his knees. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t summon the same explosive force. That surge of power from earlier had vanished. No more five-meter leaps.

  A loud gurgle from his stomach reminded him of something more immediate: he was starving. And worse, thirsty. He eyed the pool again but clenched his jaw. No way was he dying to some microscopic parasite.

  Then, a thought. [Inventory]! He’d stashed a few fruits yesterday.

  He opened [Analyse], and something new caught his eye. Where his name had once been blurred out by #ERROR, something else now shimmered faintly beneath.

  He squinted.

  “Ash… Ashram?”

  The name rang a bell. He’d heard it somewhere. Now it hovered just under his own, like the two were layered, overlapping. Two identities, side by side.

  And just below that, a new line:

  [Nucleus]: Jade.

  Another puzzle. One more line on a growing list of questions he couldn’t answer.

  He sighed and pulled a black fruit from his inventory. It looked like a massive, rough-skinned cherry.

  He bit in without thinking.

  “Ugh.”

  Bitter and sour. Like a green mango soaked in lemon. He almost spat it out, then caught himself. The fruit might’ve tasted awful, but it fed him. And it quenched his thirst.

  He winced and kept chewing. With each bite, a shift rippled through him. Warmth threaded through his limbs, steady and slow. His energy began to return, breath flowing easier, thoughts sharpening. Even his muscles responded, drawing taut like muscles waking from a long sleep.

  A magic fruit? …yeah. No doubt.

  He pushed himself to his feet, ready to move again. The jungle around him had fallen into an unnatural hush. No cries. No snarls. Nothing stirred. Maybe Gara and the man in the toga had wiped everything out. Maybe not. But this silence felt wrong.

  He studied his hands, then lifted his gaze to the trees, and finally to the hazy horizon stretching beyond. If he wanted to stay alive, he’d have to get stronger. Find enemies. Build experience.

  “If this really is an isekai, I’m supposed to level up, right?”

  But he’d be smarter about it. No more giant spiders or nightmare centaurs. He wanted low level. Entry tier. Something reasonable.

  A nervous grin tugged at his lips.

  “Alright then…”

  He raised his head and scanned the jungle.

  “Time to hunt.”